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This time, Foxfire goes under the microscope. I threw in a few questions of my own at the end because this quiz feels a bit repetitive in some respects. I think they're planning more on readers prompting rather than some idiot plowing through the whole list. XD;;

So I found the Excessively Detailed Headcanon Meme and set it aside as something I wanted to do eventually, and today, I tackled it for Rafe~ And suddenly I discovered, how many ways can I say "Prim, proper, somewhat anal retentive, with little to no life?" I'm going to have to do Foxfire next just so that the comparison is blindingly obvious. I feel like they repeat a lot more here than they could have; maybe I'll switch out some of the questions for things that are more exciting or cover fresh ground. XD

I posted this on tumblr awhile back and forgot about putting it here~ I haven't been working on writing at all lately, but I really should. -_-; On the upside, I made a Rafe as my starter character for FF14, and there's hope that a Foxfire may follow sometime. At the very least I'm having fun RPing Rafe, to the extent that FF14 is able. (Rafe's a Wild Wood Elezen (read: elf), stupid tall, widows peak and all, resident of stiff-necked and divided Gridania. He starts out wishing to be a Wood Wailer as an archer, but finds he does have a regrettable affinity for setting things on fire, so he seeks training as a mage in Ul'Dah, even though the corruption in that city makes his skin crawl. Foxfire, when he joins the scene, is going to be an arcanist/summoner coming out of the cheerfully piratical and loose-moraled Limsa Lominsa. Look, these things happen.) And it does keep the characters fresh in my mind, even if I have to keep canon and RPG separate. . .

This is a wee chunk of canon backstory for Rafael from before the story begins, and is noteworthy for having been written on Twig and Lunar's couch when I visited Boston. :D Old cities are good for writing old cities.

(I love how I find errors whenever I reread things. Augh. Suffice to say I will deal with the wonky numbers at another time. Names are, as always, bullshitted on the spot. The fun thing is that Sarvan did not really exist before I started this, beyond the thought that Rafe's brother's in-laws are factors/distributors in the city, and that they're all pretty fiery lively people. :D)

I keep attempting to poke at this thing for my "I can't believe it's not Nano" - wherein the Nano is implied because any time I attempt to commit to something, that does horrible terrible no good things to my inspiration/ability to function. I don't think I've fooled my brain, though, because this has been a stone-cold son of a bitch to actually get anything down for. Instead I keep getting heaps and heaps of back story and details.

So this is the kind of detail I keep getting. *makes faces* Elements are kind of a big thing here; not so much Avatar-ish, but it has a lot to do with how their magic works. A person might be anywhere on a spectrum between the four traditional points, with metal being the midpoint between earth and fire, lightning (energy) between fire and air, storm (weather) between air and water, and wood between water and earth. Someone could reasonably expect to be the same alignment as the rest of their family. Sarassa, while not being a magic-using country, still considers alignments the same way you’d think of a personality test or zodiac sign.

Foxfire basically showed up and went " I named myself after swamp gas! This is how I roll." So yes, word of warning that all the names are so bullshitted. Especially the locations. (It goes country - Sarassa, state/region - Ciant, city - Paracen.) And even then I catch myself spelling them wrong so AHAHAHA internal consistency what internal consistency? Sarassa is basically my fantasy Italy/Greece Mediterranean equivalent. You want the history of Sarassa, I can give you that! I can tell you what the city is like, how the three Watches of the Guard generally operate, how this poor bastard Rafe has generally spent any given year of his life. . . ALL OF THAT. Write you a coherent story involving the aftermath of foreign interests and prejudice intersecting with magic and mayhem, well, I'm afraid I'm fresh out. Augh.

The story is supposed to be: Rafael's a stubborn, stiff-necked, ill-favored Lieutenant of the Night Watch! Foxfire is a wastrel dilettante being pressed into service as an envoy from the magic-using country everyone hates and fears! THEY FIGHT CRIME! (And stop wars.)

Guess what I did this evening! :D I wrote out the premise and breakdown of Odin's Children~ I am so ashamed that ALMOST NONE OF THIS made it through in the webcomic before it shut down. So much world-building. So much.

None of this is discussing what happens directly in the story, but it does bring us up to speed with where the story starts from. The backstory would obviously be released much more slowly in story, rather than info-dumping like this. In the same vein, I also did a run-through of stats and bios for a bunch of the mains who came to mind, but I'm debating posting that as backstory and in-depth personality breakdowns are somewhat spoilery by nature.

There's a questions for writers meme floating around on tumblr, especially regarding what got you started and what your first story really was. This got me thinking, and another writer posted that she thought what got her started writing was really what she was reading, and that the two go hand in hand. I concur! So I then set forth to chronicle how I became addicted to the written word.

So sometimes I feel in the mood to poke my original characters. This is for an unspecified urban fantasy world of mine, where I basically have a ton of different characters and their own stories whom I can pretend are all co-existing in the same world. A fairly alarming number of them come from dreams. I think the progenitor story is well over a decade old by now. Apparently I had this idea almost exactly three years ago! And it decided it wanted to be poked at today. It's more character building than anything else, a little slow exploration.

And what might be a recruitment.

I kind of love that while I had the character concept in mind before, she wasn't actually a person with any sort of details until I started putting words together. Then it comes out that she's named Rhea, is a plump twenty-something mixed race woman of indeterminate queerness, rooming with a cheerful morning person Asian girl she met in college. These things happen.

Also in this universe are, notably, the blind arbiter, the okashira maitre'd and the restaurant ninjas, the journeyman sorcerer and the unicorn, the reality-challenged Seer, the changeling child and his foster-fae counterpart, and even possibly a very disgruntled accountant. (The sorcerer waits tables at the ninja restaurant for cash, the arbiter judges cases from the police detectives who may or may not be a Pixie and Minotaur, no one wants to admit to being even distantly related to the accountant but possibly the organization he encounters has tendrils that reach into all of the above. Certainly they'd be happy to employ one misplaced unicorn from Summer. *jazzhands* It's all connected!)

Sah, I have an Otakon recap that has sat for over a week in-progress; not sure I need to write it up properly now given so much time has passed. Suffice to say, it was good! Hotel was surprisingly swank! Food was delicious! The Mews were awesome! Amusing to note, I found myself using nonsense filler words for effect and emoting . . . the way I tend to around long-time friends. So either they automatically slotted into that "I should have known you forever" space in my head or I was just that sleep-deprived. XD They definitely got me unfiltered; it was like a four-day-long sleep over.

The other thing to shake out of Otakon is my inspiration. I'd initially gone hoping to connect with the RotG fandom; I knew two other RotG authors at least were going, amongst other fans and cosplayers. What actually happened is that . . . I used up my bravery just introducing myself to the authors, and didn't have anything left over to manage an actual conversation with. It was extremely awkward. And I basically retreated immediately in both cases. *sigh* The more time goes by, the more I feel like I don't belong in the fandom any more, and it's not resonating with me as much. There's still an active fandom, but I'm not on the right wavelength with them. And that's okay. They're not wrong. But it's not what I'm interested in, it's not what I was writing. I don't think anyone will care that much either way whether I write more for RotG or not. I don't like to abandon things and I'll never say never, but right now, it's not happening.

What I did get a kick in the pants for is Odin's Children, as the Mews actually remembered and recognized it. XD That just . . . I floundered for awhile, because - MY OCS. THE TERRIBLE OLD ART WORK. THEY REMEMBERED IT FONDLY. They probably heard more than they wanted to about it for the rest of the con because that stirred up the old characters. While I had Mr. Feather Mullet Schlagger on my brain the most at the con, Sabre has been the most talkative for me this week.

For Twig, who is TwigCollins pretty much everywhere. (She is an awesome and way more prolific writer than me. I envy her ability to write epics because damn do I love me some epics.) Originally posted on tumblr as follows!

For Twig’s request~ Grudgingly watching a meteor shower on a mountain peak, can do! Probably more shippy than it should have been, considering Pitch is griping like a geriatric octogenarian stuck babysitting a twelve year old. Err. Sorry.

So, the tale of How I Nearly Killed My Best Friend In The Woods, But She Was Totally Asking For It.

There was a weekend, years ago, when I went to visit my then best friend at her college campus. Staying at her dorm was a bit of a trial, because her university was strict on visitor rules and you absolutely had to be signed in/out . . . and there was a curfew. This will be important later.

Said campus adjoined a forested mountain ridge, upon which, my friend promised, was the best view of the city lights at night. It was just a little hour hike out, she'd done it with friends while everyone in the group was drunk out of their minds. We were sober, we had a flashlight, it couldn't possibly be that bad! So what it was cold, I was wearing good waterproof walking shoes and she was raring to go. We were Out for an Adventure.

I should have known things were going to get exciting when the first part of this adventure involved crossing a stream upon a two-foot-diameter round pipe instead of a bridge. Apparently if you were brave you'd just walk across the thing, but it was something like a six foot drop into cold water, and I compromised by throwing dignity to the wind and scooting across. I have never had exceptional balance, and I have always had exceptionally bad luck. No tempting fate for me!

The first part of the hike wasn't that bad, and it wasn't too dark to begin with. Woods, I'm good. The excitement came when we hit the rock face. Oh yes. See, the best way to get up this ridge to the outlook from the campus was diagonally up the cliff face. With, you know, a better than hundred foot drop only a matter of feet to my left or a missed step behind me. Yeaaaaaah. Guess who had the flashlight. Not I. Guess who couldn't see where they were going half the time and was terrified of edges.

*raises hand*

So I would yell at my friend to give me light to cross the not-so-pleasant patches, and she would. . . until I was about two thirds of the way across. Then away the light went, each and every time, leaving me to traverse the last lonely dark steps on my own. I was scared shitless. And pissed as hell. I get very . . . snarky when peeved, and I have two kinds of friends. One thinks that I am Hell On Wheels and it is totally time to duck and cover when I am angry. A direct quote is "I think my balls would shrivel up into my body if you were pissed at me." The other thinks it is time for popcorn because man, the show has started. You may guess which one she is.

I have no idea how more students from that school have not broken their necks doing that while inebriated. Possibly you don't notice the drops so much when you're drunk. There were a great deal of unpleasant moments, then we finally got to the top. "Isn't it beautiful?" she said, as we looked across perhaps a handful of large buildings at night, standing beside a perfectly usable roadside outlook. I silently thought a great deal of swear words and lamented that she had evidently never been to a city. Not to mention-

"You mean we could have just drove here?!""Yeah, but it's not the same! We hiked and did the real thing.""We are not taking the cliff route down. There has to be another way."

So I put my foot down, and she led us down the mountain, through the woods the whole way. It was far less imminent death by long drops, and far more scrambling and sliding through wet leaves and humus on our backsides. And a great deal less direct, as we ended up at the bottom of the mountain on a road with no idea where we were. My friend insisted that if we went through the woods on the other side until we found the stream, we could then follow the stream to the totally-not-a-bridge, and we'd be back at the campus in no time. She kept ranging twenty to thirty feet in front of me through the woods, taking the light with her, while I brought up the rear, tired, cold, and pissed. We'd been on the go for several hours by this point and were well and truly lost.

And that was when I dropped straight into a hip-deep puddle of mud that I never saw coming.

Waterproof shoes, when dropped below the water line, become fantastic water-filled buckets. On your feet.

Cold, tired, pissed, and now wet and muddy from the hips down. Shoes squishing with every step. And my friend was still laughing at me. Murder was imminent.

Then suddenly, we heard meowing. Tiny, piteous meowing. Two itty bitty kittens came out of the woods towards my friend, because she had the light. They were so young, their eyes were still blue, and small enough to be scooped up in one hand. We looked, but there was no sign of any others, and they were tiny and shivering. We decided some asshole probably dropped the kittens off from the road. Conclusion: like hell we're leaving tiny kittens in the woods alone, especially when it's this cold. Murder averted.

So we went to pick them up, one kitten each, and that's when we found out they were not actually kittens, they were miniature hellspawn. In other words, feral. They hadn't been handled before, but they knew they didn't like it. Now we had our moral quandaries in hand, hissing, spitting, clawing the whole way. I, being in sound possession of common sense, demanded we head back to the road. There was very obviously a correct (away from the mountain) and incorrect (towards the mountain) way to go on the road, and much better chances of us actually getting somewhere before dawn. Lo and behold, ten minutes of walking later, we were back at the campus, wet, muddy, each holding a squawling kitten competing to declare which was being murdered louder.

It was in this state that we walked into her campus's police HQ, to politely demand they tell us what we could do with the itty bitty bundles of fluff. Their answer? Nothing. It was now close to one thirty in the morning, since we'd started this lovely adventure at perhaps nine o'clock. Not exactly vet or shelter visiting hours.

Dilemma.

We headed back to her dorm, and my friend pressed squawling ball of fluff number two into my free hand and went "Here, sit in my car while I go inside to figure out what to do." Fantastic. I got to sit, still wet and muddy in her cold, dark car, holding two angry tiny kittens instead of one. For half an hour or more. She finally came back with a backpack and declared that the only thing to do was to smuggle the kittens in, because no emergency vets would take them overnight since they weren't hurt. They would catch hell from the university if caught with them in the dorm, because their pet rules were incredibly inflexible, but what could you do? I was dubious but at this point, I was beyond not giving a damn and all for being able to put the kittens down where they could stop attempting to kill me. I hadn't dared let them go in her car because they would undoubtedly hide somewhere and be impossible to get out again. Into the backpack they went. She took the bag o' kittens and we headed in. Her roommate, a very kind soul all around, was waiting in the lobby.

My friend bolted for the elevator, leaving me with her roommate, and it was at this point we recalled that oh hey, two a.m. is well after curfew. The RA on duty was not happy, but I was obviously In A State, so they allowed the roommate to sign me in. Thank god. When we arrived upstairs, my friend explained that the bag o' kittens had started meowing, and she made like a bandit before getting caught red-handed. I pretty much shrugged and declared the mission a success.

So the two sister kittens spent the night in a spare aquarium before being ferried to a shelter in the morning, I had the best hot shower in the history of ever, and my friend escaped death. Barely.

Open discussion thread for RotG fics, headcanons and plots! This is mostly just so that anyone who doesn't have dreamwidth but would like to poke me or ask questions has somewhere to do so. If someone needs/wants me to turn anonymous comments on, I can, but that usually just draws spam bots out of the woodwork. I really use tumblr more these days, but their reply system makes holding a conversation nearly impossible.

So- questions, comments? Do I obviously prefer my Pitches in leather pants? (Because I apparently do.) Progress:Shadowplay 9, 13.5 pages; we decided not to split after all. So the whole shebang is posted now!Shadowplay 10 two weeks out, hopefully- this is going to be a Many Things Happen chapter with a lot of heavy lifting. (Last one before epilogue!)

Song and Dance snippets - at least three bits to post~Fearless 1, complete, waiting for a decent buffer before it starts going up!

(Telling myself not to work on oneshots/anything else for the meme until I get a good handle on what's on my plate! XD Only so many long fics I can handle at once. . . I am working on some standalone scenes to drop in between Taken and Fearless. They need a proper title!)

Somehow I ended up writing fic again! For a very shiny kids movie, of all things. I can't help it; Rise of the Guardians has a disgruntled snarky bastard. I am so very weak to those. I challenged Flidget to find my fill on the anon meme, with a very specific set of cues. . . . It took awhile. But she got there in the end. XDFlidget:

5:36 PM Oh God

OH GOD

you wrote Pitch North buddycop fic

5:37 PM this was not predicted

And then, I made her beta it. XD Thank you, Flidget. If the bunnies stop pestering me for a sequel, I might actually make the other two fics I'm working on gel together into something I can post. *rubs hands together* Without further ado:

Midnight Sun

The one where Santa Claus and the Boogeyman take an accidental field trip to the Arctic in summer. Pitch wishes to fire his travel agent in the most literal sense. North thinks it's just like old times. Clearly this is all North's fault.